by Ben K. Green
Harrison had helped me pull yellowweed several times for the other experimental sheep and was glad to cooperate in every way possible to help me to run this pasture test. He fenced off the four-hundred-acre plot from the rest of the ranch. This plot contained one big long water trough where the sheep would have to water, and this would make them easier to observe.
This was range country, about three thousand feet elevation, and this particular pasture was rolling country covered with low-growing, scrubby, black brush and greasewood, with a few mesquite trees in the draws. The only grass in the pasture was tough bunch grass, commonly referred to as burro grass, which sheep seldom eat except in the early summer when tender shoots come out close to the ground. Yellowweed covered all the slopes and the upper end of the draws and grew up to the shade of some catclaw bushes that were on the ridge.
Dow Puckett furnished seventy-five head of cut-back lambs that were of too small and inferior quality to sell with the usual lamb crop. We took particular pains to tatoo a number in the ear of each one of these sheep in case I needed to keep individual records as to their sickness and recovery. I kept them in a lot a few days to be sure they knew how to eat feed before we put them on the yellowweed pasture.
Range livestock that have been grazed on grass and browse all their life and have never learned to eat domestically produced feeds have to be confined a few days with feed before them in a trough. After they get hungry enough to smell around, a few start eating; then the rest of them will catch on plenty fast. The best way to teach sheep to eat grain or milled feed products such as pellets is to use alfalfa hay and mix the other feed in the trough with it. Since sheep are natural green-feeders, they will take to the alfalfa first and gradually learn to eat the other forms of feed. It is always necessary to know that the sheep are all eating, and if necessary, take out the noneaters before they are put in the pasture on poisonous weeds. Otherwise, they would not be getting their dose of medication with each day’s feed.
When I had them switched off alfalfa and they were all eating the medicated pellets, it was time to move them to the yellowweed pasture. The other fellows who were interested and had been helping me with their pickups and trailers helped me haul these sheep by the railroad’s stock pen and unload them and weigh them. The average weight of this seventy-five head was 63⅘ pounds. Then we reloaded them and took them out to the yellowweed pasture and unloaded them at the water trough.
Any flock of sheep or other livestock will “walk out” the new pasture that they have been moved to and get acquainted with it the first few days and nights, so the next morning these sheep were well scattered. They hadn’t learned to come to call and I rounded them up horseback and brought them close to the water trough and poured the medicated soybean half-inch pellets on the ground. I sat around on my horse and made sure that they all ate feed.
In just a few days these sheep all came to call and were filling up on the lush tender yellowweed and were eating their daily protein supplement with the medicine in it. By the eleventh day everybody who knew about the experiment was looking for some sick sheep. There were no signs of sickness and all the sheep were staying full on fresh yellowweed and all were coming to their daily feed and medication.
By the twentieth day the talk around coffee had begun to take on a different tone and the common remark that “Maybe Doc’s found something” sounded good to my ears. However, the diehards and fogies were saying “just give ’em time—they’ll get sick ’fore long.”
By the thirtieth day no sheep were sick and I began to have visitors go out with me in the mornings when I fed. It was the general opinion of those who had seen the sheep when I first put them out there that they were gaining weight on a solid diet of yellowweed plus the protein and medication. A half pound of protein feed per day will not fatten a sheep but is only a supplementary winter feeding, so this began to focus the attention on the fact that yellowweed was a nutritious plant, and when the toxic effects were counteracted, it was a green winter weed that could be used to a great advantage in the overall operation of a sheep ranch in the weed-infested country.
The favorable result that we had gotten so far on this range experiment had caused people from far and near to be encouraging in their conversation when they were talking to me, and I heard numerous good reports from all phases of the ranching industry, including the bankers and loan companies, who were glad that there was a possibility of relief for yellowweed shrinkage and death loss in the near future. I hoped I at least had the good wishes of other research personnel in the Southwest until Mr. Damron, who was superintendent of the State and Federal Sonora Experiment Station, came to Fort Stockton to be one of the speakers at a 4-H all-day short course that was held in Rooney Park.
Tom Bond, a native of Sonora, had previously worked with Mr. Damron at the Sonora Experiment Station but had moved to Pecos County and was ranching west of town. He was helping the boys stage this day program. I went by in the afternoon to pay him my respects and visit for a few minutes during a break in the program and learned that several people had already told Mr. Damron about the yellowweed experiment. In my presence, Tom Bond volunteered that he had seen the sheep on the weed several times and had never seen any signs of sickness. He offered to take Mr. Damron out and show him the sheep; the pasture was only a few miles away and it would have been convenient after the program was over. However, Mr. Damron took a very negative attitude and said he wasn’t interested in the experiment. This was somewhat of a shock to me, but at the time I only gave it passing notice and went on tending to my practice and my research.
I had ground several hundred pounds of fresh yellowweed in my laboratory through the years that I had been researching the weed and had developed the habit of waking up at about two o’clock in the morning—at that hour my mind was clear and there was no outside interference. This is when I would test the pulp and juices with various sorts of chemical combinations and use processes of crystallization on the liquids that I had extracted, none of which had as yet yielded any inkling as to the toxic substance of the weed. At the same time, it seemed, from the progress of the sheep on test, that by trial and error this forty-seventh formula was performing beautifully, but I still didn’t have positive knowledge as to the toxic substance.
This particular morning I had filtered out 500 cc.’s of yellowweed juice using a porcelain filter and very fine filter paper. About daylight, Henry Scruggs from the West-Pyle Cattle Company pounded on my door and hollered at me to open up. When I opened the door, the office reeked with the sickening smell of yellowweed and he said, “Doc, you’ve been on that yellowweed so much I can smell it on your breath.”
He had a stud that had been bitten over the nose by a rattlesnake and this kind of a call put me under pressure to get there before the swelling smothered the horse. In my rush to leave the office, I reached over and dropped a glass stopper in the 500-cc. vial of greenish liquid.
A trip to the West-Pyle Company was about one hundred and twenty miles round trip, and if you did any work or any visiting, the call would usually use up half a day. By the time I got back to town, the drugstores had taken several other calls for me, and I was kept busy for about three days and nights and didn’t have time to pay any attention to my research.
I waked up about two o’clock on the fourth night after Scruggs had come by for me, and I thought I would throw out the old dried yellowweed that I had last ground and clean up my laboratory. After all the many attempts that I had made to work the liquid extract from yellowweed, I had never attempted to bottle and leave it for any period of time. To my surprise, the solids from the liquid of the yellowweed had gently settled to the bottom of the vial.
There was more than a half inch in depth of crystalline substance that, at room temperature and without any effort on my part, had dropped out from the liquid substance. I very carefully poured off the liquid in another vial and then, by adding a small amount of triple-distilled water to the crystals, I very gently agitated th
e crystal away from the bottom of the vial and poured them into a porcelain onyx-lined crystallization dish. I placed this dish about two feet away from the heat element of a dehydration lamp. When it was thoroughly dry, it was an off-white color with a very faint greenish tinge.
After I had worked with yellowweed these years, I had lost some of my caution about toxic substances, and without giving a thought to the possible toxic content of the dried crystals, I dampened my finger and took a fair taste of it in my mouth. Some pharmacists can identify as many as four or five hundred botanical drugs by smell and taste, and a laboratory technician can ofttimes identify one hundred or more substances by the same method. In my life’s experiences in the livestock business and practice of veterinary medicine, I had eaten about every kind of vegetable substance that cattle, sheep, or horses would eat, but this was a new one, and I had no taste experience that compared with these crystals.
There were almost enough crystals to fill a No. 10 horse capsule. These empty capsules were of gelatin substance and would not cause a chemical reaction, so I filled a capsule, put it in my vest pocket, got in my car, and drove to the airport at Midland, and sent it to a laboratory in New York City where I knew an old laboratory technician who I knew could identify the contents of the capsule. Two days later I received an airmail special-delivery letter identifying the properties contained in the crystals from yellowweed.
This, to my certain knowledge, was the first time that the substance had ever been isolated and identified. This was valuable information and could I have found it earlier would have greatly shortened the time, expense, and trouble I had spent evolving the formula that I was feeding to the experimental sheep. However, by the trial-and-error process, I already had developed the right formula and I made no changes after I knew what the toxic substance was.
For the next several weeks the only development was fat sheep. At the end of sixty days, the weed had begun to diminish and other vegetation had started to grow, so I cut these sheep off of feed and left them for forty-four days more and none became sick. They continued to gain weight, which brought up the argument of the possibility that a long period of medication might develop some immunity to continued grazing on yellowweed. For the last month there was little or no additional gain in the sheep and they were still fat, but the weed began to dry up, so we decided to ship them to market.
George Baker from the Fort Stockton Pioneer newspaper, who also had ranching interests, went out with us to round up the sheep when we decided to ship them. George gathered his own story from the fat sheep which were rounded up from the hills and draws that were a solid blanket of yellow since the weed had matured, toughened, and was in full bloom. The fat sheep were proof that yellowweed was a nutritious plant and that the medical formula had neutralized its ill effects and caused the weed to be looked at in a different light by those who owned yellowweed pastures. Although the war was over, technical materials were still hard to get and George did not have the film to take pictures of these sheep; but he gave a very accurate write-up in the Fort Stockton Pioneer.
Oscar Cain had half a carload and let us ship this bunch of fat yellowweed sheep in the top deck of his railroad car. He was shipping a different class of sheep from the experimental sheep, and even though they did not get mixed, if they had done so it would have been easy to separate them.
The sheep averaged 93½ pounds and averaged $11.01 a head and fifty-six of the better sheep brought 13¢ a pound, which was the top price for fat sheep the day and the week that they went to Fort Worth.
There had been some speculation around town and among people who knew about the experiment as to whether such a prolonged period of medication would affect the flavor and quality of the mutton from these sheep. There was also some doubts as to the flavor of the mutton that had grazed on yellowweed for this length of time.
When I brought these sheep to town to ship them, I cut out a big, aged, fat mutton. This one was probably the fattest sheep in the bunch. I asked my friend Marcus if he would like to have a fat sheep barbecue for his and my friends over at the goat ropin’ next Saturday night at M. R. Gonzalez’s Rancho Grande. He said that they would “shore be much obliged,” so I told him to go up to the stock pens and butcher that mutton and all I wanted him to bring me was the liver.
Early the next morning before it got hot, Marcus came to the office with the liver wrapped up in brown paper and told me that was the fattest mutton he had ever butchered in all his life. I cut a little piece off the liver and did some laboratory testing on it for the possible accumulation of drugs. An excess of any prolonged medication that is harmful will sometimes be stored in the liver. However, the laboratory analysis showed no presence of any foreign substance. I wrapped the liver and put it in refrigeration until Marcus had the big barbecue at the goat ropin’.
I went to the goat ropin’ next Saturday night and had a little barbecue and watched the crowd that had eaten the mutton for a little while and went back to the office and went to sleep.
The next day I took the liver up to Mrs. Carthuren’s Café early in the morning and asked her to cook it and smother it in onions, and I would bring some friends up for dinner. About eleven o’clock I went to look around for loafers that I didn’t feel would go home for dinner. I saw Boog Crisman and Snakey Price sittin’ down in front of the pool hall. I walked up and told them that I was feeling pretty big-hearted that day and was tired of eatin’ by myself, so I was invitin’ them to Mrs. Carthuren’s Café for dinner. Of course, it didn’t take any argument to get this done. Before we got up to the café, I had picked up three more takers.
I was takin’ a chance that they would order liver, and I had told Mrs. Carthuren not to let on if they didn’t, just to feed them whatever they wanted. As we came in and lined up on one side of the counter, I said, “Mrs. Carthuren, that smells like some of your good liver and onions, and if it is, just bring me a bait of it.” All the boys followed suit and said they would like some of that too.
Mrs. Carthuren was a little bitty woman who ran a real nice small café and her cooking was always good. She served up huge plates of liver and onions, hot rolls, French-fried potatoes, and iced tea. Some of the boys had seconds on the liver and bragged on the cookin’. Since it was summer and in the heat of the day, we all scattered to take our siesta. Now, I already knew that that meat didn’t hurt the bunch over at the Rancho Grande ropin’, and I was too tough for that liver to hurt me even if it was bad.
Along in the late afternoon, my dinner time friends began to come out into the shade and gather at the coffee grounds. By the time I had made it around and visited with all of them, they were still braggin’ about what a good dinner we had and that was the best liver they ever “et.” I gently broke the news to them that the liver was from a yellowweed sheep. None of them showed any signs of turning pale and all of them laughed and commented that they believed all sheep ought to have yellowweed and Doc Green’s feed before they was butchered. We had a big laugh and decided that we had settled the question, and there was no doubt that yellowweed affected the meat of a sheep unless it made it better.
The spring crop of yellowweed had gotten tough, but the hot summer sun had stopped the growth of other vegetation. Old sheep will eat tough weed before lambs will and I was trying to get all the evidence during this grazing year. We turned a second flock of sheep in the same pasture, one hundred and twenty Rommeldale ewes.
They were grazed and fed on the same medication for thirty days and then were taken off the feed for seven days. During this period of seven days, one died and twenty-seven became sick in varying degrees. The sick sheep were put on medicated feed, and after three days all but one recovered. They were left on feed sixty days before the weed completely played out for the season.
YELLOWWEED CURE
I had bought up all the available drugs to compound this 1,400 pounds of feed that had been fed successfully to the last flock of sheep. There was a good healthy interest among the ranchers, and a num
ber of them wanted to feed some of the medicated feed to their sheep the coming winter if we had sufficient early rainfall to make yellowweed.
I felt that the last experimental sheep had compiled enough proof and evidence that there would be a demand for some medicated feed to be fed on a commercial basis, and it was way past time for me to begin to get some of the money back for the several years of research. I was aware that the drugs were an expensive additive to the cost of feed, and I knew that I had to go to the original source of supply to buy quantities for later-date shipments in order for the drug-refining companies to be able to give me the best possible price.
In late summer we began to get some good rains that assured an early yellowweed crop that fall. Through correspondence with the larger drug houses, I had been told that in order to get the drugs that had to be shipped by water from other points of the world, I would have to go to New York City to establish priority through the proper channels for cargo space for a low freight bearing raw-drug material.
After my summer practice had begun to slack off and before the fall rush began, I got my business in order and drove to New York City for the sole purpose of arranging for raw-drug-bearing materials to be shipped by water freight to the processors in New York who would extract and refine the drug substances. The major drug supplier was perfectly willing to cooperate in securing and refining these drugs from their original source in the tropical islands. However, I was asking for more of these drugs than there had ever been any common demand for, and the drug company said that they would have to have a marginal cash advance before they would be interested in stocking items that heretofore had only been on demand in nominal quantities. I called Dow Puckett, and he wired me the cash needed to make the contract final. This took a matter of two or three days, and I turned around and started back to the Far Southwest.